Don't forget: linux-vserver and openvz

Posted Jan 12, 2006 19:49 UTC (Thu) by dowdle (subscriber, #659)
Parent article: Testing out the Xen live CD

I have tried Xen... via Fedora's Xen packages. On the older Athlon I was using, kernel upgrades broke Xen. Xen also is very rough in a number of areas including OS installation. To the best of my knowledge, the Xen folks offer no mechanism for installing a client OS and all of the methods currently used have been cooked up using various pre-existing distro packaging tools.

As mentioned in the article, Xen is very fat. That is because it runs a complete system, kernel and all.

I realize that the linux-vserver project and the openvz project do NOT let you run different OSes and different kernels in their client machines... but for most people, that probably isn't an issue.

I use linux-vserver on Debian systems and openvz on Red Hat/Fedora systems. Between the two, I prefer openvz because it feels more mature and the fact that it comes with tools to manage VPS (Virtual Private Server) installation including creation of your own cache (respository) makes one wonder why Xen is lacking that... given all of the buzz behind Xen.

I installed openvz on a 6 year old Athlon system with 768MB of RAM and was easily able to create 10 virtual machines from scratch in about a minute per machine. The only drawback with openvz is that they don't include sound support and a few other things that you'd want on a desktop system... but for servers, openvz is amazing.

Now if someone could get the Red Hat distro people interested in including openvz as a default part of their distro... I would be so happy.

Don't get me wrong, Xen is amazing for what it does... but it is just too resource consuming... and I think the vast majority of people would prefer the approaches taken by linux-vserver and openvz... and ACTUALLY USE said virtualization.

OpenVZ templates are available for CentOS, Fedora 3, Fedora 4, and Debian Sarge... meaning you can create VPS machines of those distros.

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Don't forget: linux-vserver and openvz

Posted Apr 12, 2006 3:04 UTC (Wed) by SocketCreep (guest, #37089) [Link]

One concern I have is this: Although Virtualization is great for maximizing server utilization, it would seem to also to create a single point of failure. What is there were a hardward failure? All services and virtual servers would go down. (Unless you had a fault tolerant system with built-in hardware redundancy.)

So, along with that concern is a question: How well does virtualization do in a clustered environment? Does the process load get distributed well to the nodes, or would it stay on the host or master node?

I do not have any experience yet with clusters or virtualization, but am thinking this could be a great way for all those old cpu we all have laying around to be used.